Architecture News

Located in the heart of Westminster, a short distance away from the Buckingham Palace, Henning Larsen are building a community hub that reimagines traditional office and commercial spaces. 105 Victoria Street will be the architecture firm's first ever project in London, providing visitors with an urban plaza that enables an active and social working environment both indoors and outdoors. The project is being developed by BentallGreenOak and is designed in collaboration with Adamson Associates Architects and KPF.

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The new Atelier collection from Italian manufacturer of porcelain-stoneware tiles Casalgrande Padana shows the power of softer colour tones.

Zaha Hadid Architects is collaborating with Hyperloop Italia to co-design the next phase of works of the transport vehicles, marking a turning point for the future of transportation. The collaboration aims to merge transformative architecture, engineering, and urban planning with the most efficient and sustainable transport network to improve accessibility, connectivity, and well-being in cities.

The Spanish Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism BEAU 2021 has announced the finalists for its 'Research Exhibition', 'Thesis Projects Exhibition', and 'Photography Exhibition' categories. The winners will be announced on July 2, coinciding with the opening of the event at the Patio Herreriano in Valladolid.

After completing One Vanderbilt, the tallest office building in New York, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates has unveiled plans for a new skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan. The 320-metre high office tower at 343 Madison Avenue makes the most out of its relatively small plot and the silhouette mandated by the New York City zoning laws, featuring a series of receding volumes that leave a way to gardens and terraces at different levels. When completed, the project will also create an important new transit entrance to the Long Island Rail Road and the Grand Central Complex.

To answer the Biennale's question of "How Will We Live Together", curators of the national pavilions explored what the future would look like in an architectural, cultural, and environmental context. Many saw the future as an entirely virtual environment whereas other highlighted the cruciality of physical coexistence with neighbors. ArchDaily met with Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, curator of the Russian Pavilion, to discuss how the idea of the pavilion came together throughout the year as a virtual platform for interdisciplinary creative thinkers, the role of cultural institutions across physical and digital spaces, and how digitalization is always part of the conversation.

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Construction work began for Herzog & de Meuron’s transformation of a former power plant building in San Fransico into a mixed-use project. Designed in collaboration with California-based practice Adamson Associates, the adaptive reuse of iconic Station A is part of the Portrero Power Station project, the redevelopment of a 29-acre industrial site into an extension of the Dogpatch neighbourhood. Herzog & de Meuron’s design retains and repurposes various features of the industrial building while adding a lightweight, steel-framed structure on top, thus giving new life to one of San Francisco’s landmarks.

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Industrial architecture usually requires fast installation, low-maintenance components, and flexible spaces that can be used for different purposes. Therefore, modular solutions are very common in this type of construction, also adding a powerful visual language to the building.

Known for projects situated at the intersection of research, design, biomimicry, and sustainability, Atelier Marko Brajovic recently developed a proposal for the Amazon Creative Laboratories, a series of biospheres composed of geodesic structures inspired by the internal geometry of the cacao fruit. The project aligns with the premises and goals of the Amazon 4.0 initiative, which aims to combine the economic potential of Amazonian socio-biodiversity with the new technologies and opportunities emerging from the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

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In 2019, to mark its founding anniversary, Belo Horizonte received a gift in the form of an architectural competition. The national contest sought preliminary technical studies for the requalification of the historic and landscape heritage of Bernardo Monteiro Avenue. 

This heritage site, characterized by a dense grove of large, leafy Ficus trees, was affected by infestations of the so-called "ficus whitefly." This caused defoliation and dried branches, severely compromising many of the trees, damaging the area's historical-cultural identity and public character, and forcing the relocation of the craft, flower, food, and antique markets that once operated there.

Talking to the Louisiana Channel, iconic Japanese architect Kengo Kuma discusses the many influences that have shaped his work - and also delves into the impact that the ongoing pandemic has had on the architectural field. In the interview, Kuma describes how influential his early upbringing was to his architectural career. Growing up in a small wooden house in the 1950s - originally built in 1942, would go on to guide his architectural perchance of using wood in his projects. Kuma also mentions Japanese architect Kenzu Tange as a key inspiration and cites Tange's Yoyogi National Gymnasium - constructed for the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo - as a project that would influence him towards an architectural career.

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Videos

"When we enter the restroom, we are never alone. Instead, we are entangled in a network of bodies, infrastructures, ecosystems, cultural norms, and regulations". Although restrooms are often overlooked facilities that cater to the needs of individuals, they are, however, spaces where gender, religion, race, hygiene, health, and the economy are defined and expressed. For the 17th International Architecture Exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia, Matilde Cassani, Ignacio G. Galán, Iván L. Munuera, and Joel Sanders designed two pavilions that exhibit how restrooms are political architectures, serving as battlegrounds for the world's disputes.

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Cobe’s winning design for the new library of the University of Gothenburg proposes a light, clean volume, whose slightly curved facades are a nod to the pages of an open book. The Danish architecture studio translates the concept of knowledge as the heart of a library into the interior spatial configuration of the project, while the architectural image evokes the idea of a lighthouse. Featuring a transparent and open ground floor, the new repository of knowledge creates a strong connection with the surrounding park, becoming a mediator between the city and the university.

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In a Design and the City episode - a podcast by reSITE on how to make cities more liveable – Mexican architect Michel Rojkind talks about running, coming from a musical background, and the responsibility of architects to create buildings that can “give something relevant” back to the community. The interview delves into Rojkind’s philosophy of making sure that architectural conversations are not insular, but instead conversations that take place within a multi-disciplinary context.

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Located in the Balvanera neighborhood of Buenos Aires, Manzana 66 is an example of community resistance and collective action. Its name originates from its designation in the Buenos Aires City Land Registry; the block is bounded by Belgrano and Jujuy Avenues, and Moreno and Catamarca Streets. This section of the city was a point of contention for several years, having been initially demolished to build an indoor arena for music events, destroying housing from the 1920s and displacing its residents.

From **September 24 to 26**, the seventh edition of Open House Madrid will take place, an architecture and urbanism festival that promotes architecture by opening the doors of various works of great cultural and heritage value to the public, aiming to bridge the gap between the public, professionals, enthusiasts, and the city.

A few weeks ago the photographer Aldo Amoretti launched an unusual call inviting his and ArchDaily's followers to share their favorite places so that he could later photograph them, in a sense of a collective perspective and with the objective of discovering places. Last week we showed the finalists and today Amoretti has already chosen the places that he will go to document, which will be published on ArchDaily in the coming weeks.

ZGF Architects, Wexford Science & Technology, and The University of Pittsburgh have revealed new details of the Ford Motor Assembly Plant adaptive reuse in Pittsburgh. Called The Assembly, the project aspires to become a hub of university research, entrepreneurial activity, and innovation programming. The six-story crane shed was used to hoist parts unloaded from the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks for assembly.